The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

For anyone casting about for a place to begin with Baudrillard, this might be a good place to start. It is a sort of summing up of his main themes, and the curious reader who has heard about such things as 'simulacra,' 'virtual reality,' 'integral reality,' and the like can rest assured that he will find Baudrillard discoursing here upon the themes which made him most famous. Is there enough room, Baudrillard asks, for both the world and its (virtual) double? As we attempt to seal the world shut beneath a dome of virtuality that attempts to eliminate all forms of noise and chaos, the inherent evil in the world continually resists this Western sanitization in the form of accidents, crashes, terrorist violence and natural disasters. The attempt to virtualize the world is simultaneously an attempt to eliminate all forms of evil from it, but Baudrillard seems fairly confident that this will never happen. A complete sealing shut of the world behind a dome of virtuality can never be a success since evil is part of the very nature of the world that is in process of being cloned. To clone the world is also to clone its evil. Baudrillard is at his best when discoursing upon the death of the spectator or the effects of electronic technology upon society, but he is less effective in his discussions of ethics and evil. The reader constantly finds himself fighting the urge to categorize Baudrillard as Manichean, but this is a myth that is too radically certain of itself to fit comfortably within Baudrillard's nihilism, with its decentered and ironic gaze. At times, though, one suspects Baudrillard of being a closet mystic. Wouldn't THAT be a wonderful irony! At the root of all his sceptical perspectives would lie an urge to be free of Western culture forms and to dissolve himself into the white radiance of a non-existent certainty. --John David Ebert, author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society

Gotta give it for France for bringing so many heavyweights in the Postmodern ring of thoughts. Baudrillard is something of a post-Marxist academic gone wild, hitting you from every angle, slowly decentering the virtual world of the subject into the ritualistic world of objects. A must-read, Worth the time deciphering through the countless paradoxes and hints of esoterism.